The present invention is related to a thin connector having a flat shape such as a connector for a card type recording medium, a connector for a flat cable terminal, or the like. Also, a thin insertion object referred in the present invention denotes a card type recording medium or a flat cable terminal.
On account of a size reduction of the recent electronic devices, a card type recording medium or a thin flat cable terminal are employed widely. Upon utilizing the thin insertion object such as the card type recording medium, the flat cable terminal, or the like, when an electric power is supplied to an equipment in a situation that the thin insertion object is not correctly inserted into the connector, the corruption of data is caused in the recording medium or the failure of equipment is caused. Therefore, the thin connector equipped with the detecting mechanism that detects whether or not the thin insertion object is correctly inserted, based on conduction/non-conduction of a cantilever that deforms due to the insertion of the thin insertion object is known (see Patent Document 1). When the thin insertion object is inserted into the thin connector, this thin insertion object pushes the cantilever, and thus the cantilever is elastically deformed to change the conductive/non-conductive states. The detecting mechanism built in the thin connector detects the insertion of the thin insertion object by detecting a change of the conduction state of the cantilever.
Meanwhile, the thin connector equipped with such detecting mechanism is surface-mounted on the substrate of the equipment. Therefore, when the thin connector is fitted onto the substrate by the reflow soldering, for example, in some cases the solder crawls up from the terminal portion of the cantilever that is fitted onto the substrate. At that time, when the solder that crawls up adheres to a cantilever main body, a stress in excess of a predetermined value is loaded onto the cantilever according to a change of a spring constant of the cantilever. As a result, there is such a possibility that the cantilever is damaged in its early stage. As the technology to prevent this solder wicking, the technology set forth in Patent Document 2 or Patent Document 3 is known.
In Patent Document 2, such a method is set forth that a solder wicking preventing area is formed on contact parts of electronic members by applying a resin or ceramics that has low wettability of solder.
Also, in Patent Document 3, such a method is known that a soldering area is formed by providing a gold plating layer, to which the solder is easy to stick, on a nickel underlying layer, and then a nickel-gold alloy that has poor wettability of solder is formed by irradiating a laser beam onto an upper part of this soldering area, and thus a solder wicking preventing area is formed on the terminal portion that is fitted by the solder.    [Patent Document 1] Japanese Patent Publication No. 2009-076428    [Patent Document 2] Japanese Patent Publication No. 2005-246424    [Patent Document 3] Japanese Patent Publication No. 2005-243468